4 ms·
It's sort of fascinating how much mileage people can squeeze out of MS-DOS. A part of me always wonders about the "What If" world where GUIs never caught on, a
by tombert 2y ago
It's sort of fascinating how much mileage people can squeeze out of MS-DOS. A part of me always wonders about the "What If" world where GUIs never caught on, and how different the world might be today.
- userbinator 2y agoIt's a tiny OS that provides little more than a filesystem and program loader on top of the BIOS, and otherwise stays out of the way. Any large complex MS-DOS application itself contains functionality that would be in the OS otherwise.
- tombert 2y agoI kind of figured that, just based on the fact that there seems to be a ton of DOS-compatible clones out there, even when DOS was relevant, like Concurrent DOS. If the OS were too complex there probably wouldn’t be a lot of clones.
- ladyanita22 2y agoYeah. Basically, for most intents and purposes, any high-end MSDOS application is basically running bare-metal, as if no OS was installed in the system at all. As close to the embedded world as possible. I don't understand why is there so little documentation about MSDOS as a real-time operating system. I'd bet it would work beautifully for any piece of software that was developed with such use-case in mind.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoYou’d have to write your own scheduler.
- mr_toad 2y agoWith no memory protection a wayward process could easily overwrite the schedulers data structures, and probably hang the system.
- xxs 2y ago(ms)dos has just a file system (it's the D in the name). It has no protected memory or scheduling, or any ability to "talk" between processes. It can load executable images .exe(MZ) or sub 64KB .com. ANd yes, it's possible to reserve memory and stay resident (TSR) I have some experience repurposing 8259 (the interrupt controller), and if you hook on the timer (8), there is nothing else to return the execution back to the 'OS'. In short I'd disagree about the real-time.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoFAT is not well suited to embedded use. The TFAT hack was patent encumbered and not widely supported outside of MS products.
- thih9 2y agoAlso, it was popular to use smaller, 3rd party programs that would provide what is now part of a typical OS; e.g. Norton Commander[1]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander
- inglor_cz 2y agoI still use Midnight Commander in Linux, as it reminds me of the DOS times with Volkov and Norton. Volkov was much faster on older machines...
- raverbashing 2y agoYes For today's applications? It sucks. A lot Thread/Process control in MSDOS? In your dreams Network? Are you running Netware? Otherwise you're SOL Sound output? Sure, just set up DMA and IRQ yourself for your Soundblaster card. I mean, you have one of those right?
- rytis 2y ago> Sound output? Sure, just set up DMA and IRQ yourself for your Soundblaster card. I mean, you have one of those right? What has OS got to do with possession of some hardware?
- turol 2y agoIf the OS doesn't provide an actual sound API developers will only write support for the most popular sound cards.
- fullstop 2y agoI remember games which had extra features if you had a Gravis UltraSound.
- raverbashing 2y agoThe knowledge gap of the modern js devs is funny, thinking MS-DOS has any concept of what a soundcard is. Though even first Unixes "it's a file, just write to it" were better but just above the bare minimum
- pjmlp 2y agoAs someone that started using MS-DOS, when MS-DOS 3.3 was current, I rather have the GUIs world, thanks. I really can't grasp the TUI hype that is going on nowadays.
- hulitu 2y ago> I really can't grasp the TUI hype that is going on nowadays. We have command completion. And the GUIs have mostly become enshitified.
- johnisgood 2y agoAnd GUIs often lack configurability among other things.
- pjmlp 2y agoSince when you can extend CLI and TUIs, when not given access to source code?
- johnisgood 2y agoA hell lot of CLI and TUIs are open-source, whereas GUIs are more often (than CLI tools) closed source, though, so it is mainly an issue with GUIs.
- pjmlp 2y agoNot true for MS-DOS CLI and TUIs. Also not true for FreeBSD and GNU/Linux GUIs.
- johnisgood 2y agoHave you found it to be easier to configure GUI than CLI?
- hnlmorg 2y ago
- 2mlWQbCK 2y agoWith DOSBox-X, and probably some other DOS emulators as well, you can set up any SVGA BIOS graphics modes you want to (up to at least 32-bit color with 16-bit integers for screen width and height), so a DOS application using just the standard BIOS functions can run in fullscreen on a modern monitor. A bit trickier if you want to run on real hardware, especially since BIOS support is basically gone now. Not sure how old hardware you have to go back to to even boot up FreeDOS. I ran it on some late 00's hardware and everything runs insanely fast. I did not remember computers could be that responsive and not annoying to use.
- zozbot234 2y agoYou can still run it "on real hardware" by booting a VM. This saves the overhead of CPU emulation, though hardware access may still be slow.
- korhojoa 2y agoIt still runs on modern hardware. It'll depend on a few things if it works or not. Usual case is that CSM/bios boot support is missing.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoI have FreeDOS installed on my Ryzen machine. It runs okay except that modern video hardware doesn't dependably support classic C/E/VGA modes.
- DrillShopper 2y agoHow do you handle sound?
- skhr0680 2y agoMacs could boot from BIOS until circa 2017, and had no trouble booting from a FreeDOS live disc.